Review: ‘Abandoned Playground,’ the Punishing Place Where Dance Meets Sport

Dance show or sporting event? At the beginning of Abby Zbikowski’s exhilarating “Abandoned Playground,” which had its world premiere at Abrons Arts Center on Thursday, it’s not entirely clear. Nine dancers in uniforms of orange shorts, sneakers and heavy-duty kneepads — members of Ms. Zbikowski’s five-year-old company, Abby Z and the New Utility — warmed up on the stage of the Abrons playhouse with the focused energy of boxers preparing for a fight.

What followed over the next hour was a fight of sorts, not against one another so much as themselves. “Abandoned Playground” pits these dancer-athletes against the limits of their own strength and endurance, and they triumph. The audience, seated onstage, surrounds the performers on four sides, heightening the tension. “Doing it gets us all through it,” Ms. Zbikowski wrote in the program notes, and as you watch this passionate, punishing piece, you start to see what she means. To rest would be to lose precious momentum.

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Abby Z and the New Utility in “Abandoned Playground,” which combines aspects of a sporting event with dance.CreditEric Falck

The challenge lies in the ferociously physical steps — an onslaught of thwacking arms, emphatic kicks, dizzying spins, swift somersaults, perilous balances and slippery contortions — and their relentless repetition. In pairs or trios or alone, eventually merging into one group, the resilient dancers enter the space and rip into these tasks. They make their own music with skidding and stomping feet, though the composer Raphael Xavier offers the occasional blast of electronic sound.

As those in the center sweat and grunt, others cheer them on with shouts of “Push!” and “You got this!” One woman rises into a headstand and falls backward in one piece, a plank hitting the floor. Another bounces in a kneeling position, her torso bent over her thighs and arms by her sides, improbably inching forward.

Ms. Zbikowski, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has a background in hip-hop, tap and West African dance styles — she trained at the Senegalese dancer Germaine Acogny’s school — and those forms infuse “Abandoned Playground,” with its gutsiness and serious regard for rhythm. It also brings to mind the choreographer Elizabeth Streb’s brand of “extreme action.” Yet while Ms. Streb often relies on complex contraptions to test the laws of physics, Ms. Zbikowski uses nothing but the body and the floor.

At times, the work’s strenuousness seems absurd, or aimless. What is it all for? Yet those moments are fleeting, and ultimately, the effort justifies itself.

Abandoned PlaygroundPerformed April 13-15 at the Abrons Arts Center

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C7 of the New York edition with the headline: The Punishing Place Where Dance Meets Sport. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe